CĂRTĂRESCU, Mircea

Blinding: The Left Wing

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Behind this first row of buildings were others, and above them, stars. There was a massive house with red shutters, and a pink house like a small castle, there were short apartment blocks braided with ivy, built between the wars, that had round windows with square panes, Jugendstil ornaments on the stairways, and grotesque towers. Everything lost in the leaves, now black, of poplars and beech trees, which made the sky seem deeper, darker and darker toward the stars. The lit windows held a life I caught only in fragments: a woman ironed laundry, a man in a white shirt did summersaults on the third floor, two women sat in chairs and talked without end. Only three or four windows were ever interesting. In my nights of erotic fever, I would sit in the dark at my window, until every light was out and there was nothing to see, hoping to glimpse uncovered breasts and cheeks and pubic triangles, those men tumbling women into bed or leading them to the window and taking them from behind. Often the drapes were drawn, and then I strove, squinting, to interpret the abstract and fragmentary movements that flashed in the wedge of unobstructed light. I would see hips and calves in everything, until I had made myself dizzy and my sex dripped in my pajamas. Only then did I go to bed, to dream that I entered those foreign rooms and participated in complicated erotic maneuvers in their depths

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